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Papers by May Joseph
South Asian Popular Culture, Oct 1, 2013
It is 2012. Something unexpected happens on Facebook. An informal community that marked the urban... more It is 2012. Something unexpected happens on Facebook. An informal community that marked the urban face of Bangalore mornings during the 1970s with their colorful bicycles coalesces into a distinctive group online as the ‘Bangalore cyclists’. The emergence of this online community is galvanized around the charismatic figure of the famed Baluchistani cycling coach Om Prakash Duggal, known to Bangalore cyclists as ‘Chacha’. Chacha worked for Controllerate of Inspection Electronics during the day. But in the wee hours of the nippy Bangalore mornings, Chacha became a mythic figure whose training regimens were legendary, both for their grueling routines as well as their resulting successes. As Facebook opened up new connectivities, linking Bangalore cyclists now dispersed all over the world, Chacha lay dying in a one room dwelling near Delhi, destitute and racked with pain, his double beedi smoking habit having finally caught up with the indomitable cyclist. Chacha’s death in 2012 marks the passing of an entire generation of Indian cyclists whose immersion in the sport coincided with the transformation of Bangalore from a sleepy garden city to the choking metropolis it is today. I was one of the few individuals lucky enough to train with Chacha during the mid1970s. The invitation to train with the great coach was also an induction into an alternative way of being in the city – cycling was a representative cultural mode for that particular era. It created a utopic community of speed seekers whose knowledge of the street was diametrically opposed to the heavy traffic of four wheelers, and the nationalist sensibilities of team sports. This coterie of youth from different socio-economic milieus gravitated to the center of Mahatma Gandhi Road near the famed Gangarams bookstore in the misty hours of the morning, to create a culture of cycling in 1970s Bangalore, at the center of which remained the influential Chacha. It was an odd and disparate group forged out of a spirit for racing cycles, and shaped by a real love for the city’s streets. This Bangalore cycling community of the 1970s emerged as a distinct counter culture to the car derived logic of mainstream transportation networks, through the public practice of an active cycling culture. The presence of professional cyclists temporarily deferred the impending reality of a choked metropolis. Race cycling in Bangalore of the 1970s was entirely subcultural and subversive, even avant-garde, because it was not quite legitimate, not yet mainstream, and not easily transformed into a commodifiable sport. It consequently drew the sort of individual who was unconventional, socially marginal, and economically enterprising, as it was an expensive sport with no availability of racing bikes or technical support in India at the time.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 11, 2020
Space and Culture, Aug 1, 2006
This theme section of Space and Culture, titled “CityCorps,” stages an encounter between performa... more This theme section of Space and Culture, titled “CityCorps,” stages an encounter between performance studies and urban studies with an eye toward opening new axes of collaboration between these domains. Both share a concern with the capacities of publics to gather as critical and generative forces to bring together the social wealth of the built environment and the moving body.
Routledge eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Women & performance, Nov 1, 2007
On a clear Manhattan day in downtown Foley Square in 2004, a woman in a grey pant suit howls in h... more On a clear Manhattan day in downtown Foley Square in 2004, a woman in a grey pant suit howls in horror, face distorted in grief. She squats in despair by Luis Sanguino's 1981 statue The Immigrants located in Castle Clinton, Battery Park, in 2005. At the Storefront for Art and Architecture in ...
International Migration Review, 2000
Oxford Literary Review, Jul 1, 1995
Routledge eBooks, Apr 24, 2019
Island studies journal, 2020
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2012
African American Review, 1997
... The August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, ... more ... The August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, 1997, and moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, was a public performance of an old historic bind between the narrowly defined limits of legitimacy granted Black culture in the United ...
Sea Log is a theoretical excursion into Indian Ocean ontologies and histories. It takes an ocean ... more Sea Log is a theoretical excursion into Indian Ocean ontologies and histories. It takes an ocean centered, feminist perspective on rethinking Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes and their decolonial consequences. What are the ontological and affective consequences of living amidst the ruins of Portuguese, Dutch and later British and other colonial occupations? What sorts of affective mentalities arise in the face of rising oceans along formerly colonized coastal societies? Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas flow in a dialogic history of oceanic encounters. Daressalaam, Hanoi, Cochin and New York merge to offer emerging histories of trans-oceanic connectivity in conversation with forgotten navigational traces. First century Roman trade routes network into Fifteenth century maritime routes, revitalizing through 21st century climate concerns.
Space and Culture, Aug 1, 2006
This article is about the New York City circus company Circus Amok and its experiments in civic i... more This article is about the New York City circus company Circus Amok and its experiments in civic imaginings. The essay explores the relationship between the circus, civic belonging, urban citizenship, and the role of the moving body in public spaces such as park spaces. Circus Amok is an experimental theater group interested in bringing political critique to people in the city through free circus performances.
Women & performance, 1995
South Asian Popular Culture, Oct 1, 2013
It is 2012. Something unexpected happens on Facebook. An informal community that marked the urban... more It is 2012. Something unexpected happens on Facebook. An informal community that marked the urban face of Bangalore mornings during the 1970s with their colorful bicycles coalesces into a distinctive group online as the ‘Bangalore cyclists’. The emergence of this online community is galvanized around the charismatic figure of the famed Baluchistani cycling coach Om Prakash Duggal, known to Bangalore cyclists as ‘Chacha’. Chacha worked for Controllerate of Inspection Electronics during the day. But in the wee hours of the nippy Bangalore mornings, Chacha became a mythic figure whose training regimens were legendary, both for their grueling routines as well as their resulting successes. As Facebook opened up new connectivities, linking Bangalore cyclists now dispersed all over the world, Chacha lay dying in a one room dwelling near Delhi, destitute and racked with pain, his double beedi smoking habit having finally caught up with the indomitable cyclist. Chacha’s death in 2012 marks the passing of an entire generation of Indian cyclists whose immersion in the sport coincided with the transformation of Bangalore from a sleepy garden city to the choking metropolis it is today. I was one of the few individuals lucky enough to train with Chacha during the mid1970s. The invitation to train with the great coach was also an induction into an alternative way of being in the city – cycling was a representative cultural mode for that particular era. It created a utopic community of speed seekers whose knowledge of the street was diametrically opposed to the heavy traffic of four wheelers, and the nationalist sensibilities of team sports. This coterie of youth from different socio-economic milieus gravitated to the center of Mahatma Gandhi Road near the famed Gangarams bookstore in the misty hours of the morning, to create a culture of cycling in 1970s Bangalore, at the center of which remained the influential Chacha. It was an odd and disparate group forged out of a spirit for racing cycles, and shaped by a real love for the city’s streets. This Bangalore cycling community of the 1970s emerged as a distinct counter culture to the car derived logic of mainstream transportation networks, through the public practice of an active cycling culture. The presence of professional cyclists temporarily deferred the impending reality of a choked metropolis. Race cycling in Bangalore of the 1970s was entirely subcultural and subversive, even avant-garde, because it was not quite legitimate, not yet mainstream, and not easily transformed into a commodifiable sport. It consequently drew the sort of individual who was unconventional, socially marginal, and economically enterprising, as it was an expensive sport with no availability of racing bikes or technical support in India at the time.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 11, 2020
Space and Culture, Aug 1, 2006
This theme section of Space and Culture, titled “CityCorps,” stages an encounter between performa... more This theme section of Space and Culture, titled “CityCorps,” stages an encounter between performance studies and urban studies with an eye toward opening new axes of collaboration between these domains. Both share a concern with the capacities of publics to gather as critical and generative forces to bring together the social wealth of the built environment and the moving body.
Routledge eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Nov 7, 2022
Women & performance, Nov 1, 2007
On a clear Manhattan day in downtown Foley Square in 2004, a woman in a grey pant suit howls in h... more On a clear Manhattan day in downtown Foley Square in 2004, a woman in a grey pant suit howls in horror, face distorted in grief. She squats in despair by Luis Sanguino's 1981 statue The Immigrants located in Castle Clinton, Battery Park, in 2005. At the Storefront for Art and Architecture in ...
International Migration Review, 2000
Oxford Literary Review, Jul 1, 1995
Routledge eBooks, Apr 24, 2019
Island studies journal, 2020
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2012
African American Review, 1997
... The August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, ... more ... The August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, 1997, and moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, was a public performance of an old historic bind between the narrowly defined limits of legitimacy granted Black culture in the United ...
Sea Log is a theoretical excursion into Indian Ocean ontologies and histories. It takes an ocean ... more Sea Log is a theoretical excursion into Indian Ocean ontologies and histories. It takes an ocean centered, feminist perspective on rethinking Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes and their decolonial consequences. What are the ontological and affective consequences of living amidst the ruins of Portuguese, Dutch and later British and other colonial occupations? What sorts of affective mentalities arise in the face of rising oceans along formerly colonized coastal societies? Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas flow in a dialogic history of oceanic encounters. Daressalaam, Hanoi, Cochin and New York merge to offer emerging histories of trans-oceanic connectivity in conversation with forgotten navigational traces. First century Roman trade routes network into Fifteenth century maritime routes, revitalizing through 21st century climate concerns.
Space and Culture, Aug 1, 2006
This article is about the New York City circus company Circus Amok and its experiments in civic i... more This article is about the New York City circus company Circus Amok and its experiments in civic imaginings. The essay explores the relationship between the circus, civic belonging, urban citizenship, and the role of the moving body in public spaces such as park spaces. Circus Amok is an experimental theater group interested in bringing political critique to people in the city through free circus performances.
Women & performance, 1995
ghosts of lumumba, 2020
ghosts is a childhood memoir of the first decade of Tanzanian socialism. Written by a Tanzanian A... more ghosts is a childhood memoir of the first decade of Tanzanian socialism. Written by a Tanzanian Asian, ghosts is a book of mourning, of lost lives, forgotten revolutions, and disrupted childhoods. ghosts is a journey into the junctures between memory and history, between remembering and forgetting. It is a poetic excavation that disentangles the fractious history of Asians in Tanzania and their relationship to the possibilities of African citizenship. Through snapshots of a revolutionary youth lived under African socialism, Joseph explores the condition of decoloniality and its residual undercurrents; of living through the process of decolonization while still bearing the mentalities of the colonized. ghosts straddles the space between East Africa and South Asia; between Swahili and English; between the struggle to assimilate in the newly independent socialist state, and the tensions of a multi-racial African society. ghosts is an elegy to a lost era of socialist dreaming, and an unofficial accounting of a period in Tanzanian history little written about. It offers insights into the everyday banalities of the first decades of decolonization and its utopian socialist hopes. Amongst its pages are Instagram vignettes of tragic-comic episodes-- a minor history of peripheral lives lived, through which Joseph’s love for Dar-es-salaam, her home, emerges.
The shame that accompanies the forced migrations propels ghosts. The silence that accompanies such an experience, now a widely experienced global condition, is inarticulable. The violence, the shock, the trauma, the mental illness that accompanies such an experience, largely remains unaccounted for. The 1970s was a distinctive period, where vast numbers of people were displaced around the world. Cambodia under Pol Pot, Uganda under Idi Amin, the boat people of the Vietnam War, and the forced dispersals of Asians from East Africa are part of these cultural histories of migrations. ghosts offers glimpses into that blurry era, when the phrase “Asians kicked out of Africa” was casually used. ghosts is a footnote to today’s grim scenarios of mass deportations and the escalating policies of forced migrations.
Kaleidoscope, 2022
Kaleidoscope is a short book series of 20,000 to 50,000 words designed as an experimental and cro... more Kaleidoscope is a short book series of 20,000 to 50,000 words designed as an experimental and cross-disciplinary platform that documents and forges an innovative path forward for ethnography in a precarious era. Our interest to initiate Kaleidoscope emerges from a desire to provoke the junctures of physical and social sciences, as both a life practice and as a self-critical engagement. We welcome innovative approaches to the study of people, societies, environments, multispecies worlds, epistemologies, scapes, things, performances, and expressions that probe the potentials and limits of ethnography. The series seeks to foreground the junctures between ethnography and other disciplinary intersections.
Kaleidoscope particularly welcomes manuscripts at the intersections of archaeology, art, architecture, performance, design, and the environmental humanities that experiment with fieldnotes, fictocritical writing, lyrical sociology, flash ethnography, micro-essay, embodied phenomenology, reflexive memoir, ethnographic and auto-archaeology, the curation of hyperobjects, and conversations with the feuilleton. We are also open to manuscripts that are collaborative, co-authored, processual, performative, multimodal or push the boundaries between the ethnographer, the ethnographed, and the scene of writing. Manuscripts can be immersive, meditative, investigative, interrogative or speculative but also rigorous. Writing that addresses humans, non-humans, and the unhuman are of particular interest.